Unless otherwise indicated herein, the approaches described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
Compared with a visual identity and an audio identity, a tactile identity may be relatively difficult to achieve. Research on the tactile element has been occurring over the past thirty years, but tactile element development is, in many cases, still far behind the development of visual elements and audio elements. On the one hand, the tactile sensation contains a lot of physical information, such as shock, pressure (vertical and tangential), the shape or pressure distribution in the minimal area, and the temperature. On the other hand, inflexible the tactile devices may not function for a wide variety of applications.
For example, it has been a problem in bionics to mimic the human sense of touch using tactile sensors. In fact, the human sense of touch contains a lot of physical information. Such physical information may include heat transfer, pressure and/or friction. In some cases, it may be useful for a robot to be able to pick up a tea cup steadily without breaking it. In other cases, it may be useful for a robot to be able to pick up an egg without crushing it. Such robotic operations may entail the robot obtaining tactile information, so as to judge the kind of the object and adjust the grip to pick up the object.